Michaela Melián: Osnabrücker Gesänge – Rosi Ève Hélène.

The artist and musician Michaela Melián focuses on topics such as emigration, flight and expulsion. Her multimedia installations link stories associated with places, objects or biographies with social issues. In doing so, she creates multi-layered spaces that can be experienced by the senses.

In the Felix Nussbaum House, as part of the series "Gegenwärtig. Contemporary Art Encounters Felix Nussbaum" series, a world of sound sculptures and projections is being created that connects past and present, art and society in a special way. Melián's works encourage us to reflect on visibility, power relations and memory - they dispense with clear messages and instead emphasize the multi-layered nature and complexity of their themes.
For the exhibition, Michaela Melián is developing an installation that has emerged from her examination of the texts of the French philosopher and writer Hélène Cixous (born in Algeria in 1937). Cixous' family comes from Osnabrück and was acquainted with Felix Nussbaum and his family.
Eve Cixous - Hélène's mother - grew up in Osnabrück as Eva Klein. Her mother - Hélène's grandmother - was called Rosi Klein, née Jonas. The Jonas family had their business premises at Nicolaiort 2 in Osnabrück. Eve, her sister Eri and Rosi were able to escape from Germany in the 1930s, unlike many other family members who were murdered in the Nazi extermination camps.
 The family experiences of flight and exile are formative for the writing of the feminist thinker Cixous. Inspired by these texts, as most recently published in "Osnabrück" (2017/2018) and "Osnabrück Hauptbahnhof nach Jerusalem" (2018), a polyphonic composition is created in which women's voices in different languages and accents transcend the boundaries of the national.

Michaela Melián (* 1956, Munich) is an artist and musician. She is co-founder of the band F.S.K. and was a professor of time-based media at the University of Fine Arts (HfbK) in Hamburg until 2023. In recent years, her work has been exhibited at Lenbachhaus Munich/Germany; Fundació Juan Miró Barcelona/Spain; Kunsthal Rotterdam/Netherlands; Deichtorhallen Hamburg; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart/Germany; Kunsthalle Mannheim/Germany; Lentos Museum Linz/Austria; Cubitt London/United Kingdom; Ludlow New York; NY/USA and The War and Women's Human Rights Museum in Seoul/South Korea, among others. In 2010, she was commissioned by the City of Munich to realize "Memory Loops", an acoustic memorial to the victims of National Socialism. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden (2006), the Kunstpreis der Stadt München (2010), the Grimme Online Award Spezial (2011), the Edwin-Scharff-Preis der Stadt Hamburg (2018) and the Rolandpreis für Kunst im öffentlichen Raum der Stadt Bremen (2018).